Meiya’s presence transforms Muv-Luv into something deeply and inexplicably weird, and, at first, interesting. And then there’s Meiya Mitsurugi, a transfer student who takes one look at the traditional structure and conventions of a high school romance and throws every possible spanner into every possible work. There’s the bossy Chizuru Sakaki his childhood friend Sumika Kagami the quiet and vaguely terrifying Kei Ayamine cat-like Miki Tamase, and Yoroi Mikoto who is constantly being dragged on misguided and disastrous holidays by his adventurer father. Set across the winter term, it is ostensibly a sort of high school romance as he gets to know, and falls in love with, the various members of his class. The first, EXTRA, tells the story of Takeru, a student at Hakuryo high school in his final year. Muv-Luv is a game told in two parts, with a third, standalone part set to be released later this year. Reading back through them, there is a very specific note at which everything goes downhill, and it just reads “ugghhhhhhh”. And then, bullet point by bullet point, they start getting shorter, sharper. For a while it’s clear that I’m being carried along, in a sense, by what’s happening. Despite knowing a chunk about the game beforehand, it’s clear I’m not entirely sure what I’m getting into, and the notes continue in that vein for a while as the story unfolds. The notes I took while playing Muv-Luv, a 2003 adult visual novel that’s just been released in English, tell a story.
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